How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property

by Ben G. Price, David Korten (Foreword)

Crackdowns on local democracy are accelerating, as corporate and state interests continue efforts to repress social movements. In this well-timed book, Ben Price presciently reveals structures of power and law that facilitate blatant corporate supremacy in the United States.

Price uses his years of experience as a community organizer and a careful reading of history to show how a legal paradigm that facilitated slavery and the fossil fuel economy has endured and adapted over time - today barricading our communities and squelching dissent.

Many books have been written about wealth, power and politics in the United States. Most of them make intuitive sense. Wealthy people use their power to influence and control politics. But Ben Price's new book is often counterintuitive as he explores how wealth itself is imbued with power. He answers questions such as:

How is the American Legislative Exchange Council - a modern states' rights, free market capitalist group - the intellectual and political descendant of George Washington's Federalist Party?
How was the Fourteenth Amendment that emancipated African American slaves from their status as property used by a reactionary Supreme Court to grant legal "personhood" to private corporations?
How are cities seen under our legal doctrine as "public corporations," devoid of real governing authority?

Further, Price identifies key counterrevolutions in U.S. history that squelched the transformative potential of the Civil War and American Revolution, and traces the roots of colonial and imperial systems of control. He links them to modern "free trade" agreements and other antidemocratic structures used to supersede democracy to this day.

For some, this will come as no surprise. For others, it will be a rude, though necessary, awakening. "The white man's municipalities are just reservations, like ours," said a resident of Pine Ridge Reservation, who Price spoke with. "The difference is, we know we live on reservations. The white man doesn't."

Crucially, Price shares insight into how social movements can plant seeds of a new legal system that makes the liberty, civil rights and dignity of humans and ecosystems its ultimate purpose. In fact, he introduces the reader to people who are doing just that.

Genres: Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2019

About the author

Ben G. Price is the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s education director, with twenty years of experience organizing communities across the country to challenge state and federal legalization of corporate assaults against people and their environments. He pioneered Rights of Nature legislation in the United States and assisted scores of communities to enact rights-protecting laws.

Reviews

[Dylan]

I only skimmed this book, so I won't rate it. The book looks interesting, for sure. As an American living in Canada, hoping to use parts of this book for a university syllabus, I do have one critique: the book should be called *How Wealth Rules America*. Even the one chapter on the internationalization of American models of property is, well, fairly American in nature. I think the book's main value is to think about the ways that property has been somewhat tyrannical in American history: where the rights of property often prevail over other rights. Price is concerned to show that this was a Federalist innovation; Hamilton and others sought to elevate the rights of property. The problem is, as Price shows, this legal favoritism for property inevitably tramples on other organs, such as the vibrancy of community, public health, and the like. There are no real legal provisions to protect, say, a century-old ethnic neighborhood from being financially or literally bulldozed by predacious capital. In sum, it's an *American* book, to be used to reclaim the health of democracy, bodies, and the planet itself.

[Rick Staggenborg, MD · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most concise book I have ever read that covers all the ways in which the rich have ruled the US since it's founding. It is the one book I have found most valuable in understanding the power structure of the US that has led to the current state of corporate dominance over government and all the evils that entails.

Anyone who doubts that the constitution was written to serve the rich needs to consider who wrote it and the fact that it only granted the vote to 10% of the population, all of whom were property owning white males. One of the more interesting points made in the book was that at the Founding, people of color were regarded as property under the law, and under the doctrine of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court redefined property, in the form of corporations, as persons.

The Supreme Court has always been a huge part of the problem. Inherently conservative, it has interpreted the constitution as putting private property rights above all other considerations, including the right of communities to protect themselves from environmental and economic devastation by the rich and the corporations they own. It has stretched the Commerce Clause to cover almost all commerce and much that a rational person would never see as commerce as being subject to state and federal regulation that invariably benefits corporations.

[Noah Skocilich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

Highly energizing and enlightening.

[Ryk Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes privatization sounds more troublesome than the singularity.